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Meeting the human faces of the internet’s dark places

The far-right EDL whips up hatred online and in the streets (Image&colon; Demotix/Press Association Images)

Jamie Bartlett’s encounters with the characters behind subversive currencies and online erotica make fascinating reading, but The Dark Net is really about us

WHAT is the internet for? Meeting new people. Bullying them mercilessly. Sharing a video of yourself playing guitar. Sharing a video of yourself masturbating. Buying books. Buying drugs. Registering a vote. Requesting a murder.

For the first users of the Arpanet – a tiny network of computers set up to link a handful of academic institutions in the 1970s – there was a much simpler answer. The sole point of connecting computers was to allow the easy sharing of data. In one sense, that’s still all the internet is for. But the mess of humanity has since put its spin on things.

There is nothing you can think of, however extreme, sordid, outlandish or just plain weird, that someone else hasn’t already put online. Take the Assassination Market. Here you can add a name to a list or add money to a pot attached to a name already there. If enough people chip in and the pot for a particular name grows, or so the idea goes, then someone, somewhere, will be motivated to claim it. Would-be assassins just have to make an anonymous prediction of the exact time and place of a named individual’s death. If they make it come true, they bag the fee.

The Assassination Market is Jamie Bartlett’s first port of call in The Dark Net, a travelogue around the dark side of the internet.

It gets worse. At least the Assassination Market has the whiff of a stunt about it – to date no one has been knocked off the list. The online forums of far-right groups like the English Defence League, on the other hand, are much more successful at engendering the kind of hatred that is then vented on the streets. And since Bartlett is head of the Violence and Extremism Programme and the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at the think-tank Demos, you would expect him to be a confident and well-informed guide.

He certainly finds his way to sites that won’t pop up in a typical search engine, but most of his material is gathered from the shadowy corners of the internet’s most familiar places.

Wherever you go online, nastiness is never far away. Facebook and Twitter are as riddled with obnoxious bullies, hate-mongering extremists and illegal activity as the off-piste terrain reachable only with specialist browsers. “I came to realise that the unspoken truth about the dark net… is that everything is close to the surface,” Bartlett writes. “Hidden encrypted websites and mysterious underground drugs markets sound like they exist far beneath the surface web of Google and Facebook. But cyberspace doesn’t have depth.”

It’s easy to forget that because most of us seldom break out of our habitual browsing patterns. But we need only look at the Facebook and Twitter updates posted by ISIS since it swept across northern Iraq, for example, to get a jarring reminder.

But Bartlett has a trick that enables him to lift the book above others that riff off the allure of a secret internet, making it far more than a potpourri of pornography and pot purchasing. He goes out of his way to meet the people behind the online personas. Writing a book about the internet can be done without leaving the house; writing a good one really requires the writer to get to know society’s outsiders.

Each of the book’s nine chapters introduces us to a different set of characters. So, for example, Bartlett visits Calafou, a libertarian commune in Spain, to meet Amir Taaki. Taaki is a genius coder and architect of Dark Wallet, an anonymous Bitcoin payment system that he thinks just might save the world, one overthrown government at a time.

Then Bartlett is off again, to meet Paul, a polite and charming fascist, and later Michael, a family man convicted for downloading a hard-drive’s worth of child pornography. Michael blames the internet for his activities&colon; “I cannot believe there is so much out there! Why on earth was it so easy for me to find it?”

Bartlett gets invited by “cam-girl” Vex to witness the business end of her live three-girl webcam show. Like any good reporter, he sits perched next to her bed, just off camera, notepad on his knees.

By meeting the people behind the online activity, Bartlett humanises it. And the internet is nothing if not an enabler of everything human. It brings together people with similar interests, the nasty and extreme just as much as the harmlessly niche.

But the internet also encourages us to think of our online selves as less real. Sitting alone in front of a screen can make it hard to appreciate the “reality” of your online behaviour – it’s easy to do things we would never dream of doing in the offline world.

Technology isn’t neutral, Bartlett writes. “Technology extends the power and freedom of those that use it.” There have always been two sides to this story&colon; technology will make everything better and technology will ruin us all. Seen as an extension of ourselves, it’s likely to do neither. We shouldn’t look for salvation in any technology, especially a blank canvas like the internet. There will always be a dark side.